The Science of Web Art, Design and Development

In the last two weeks I’ve been struggling with a problem on Firefox. Text formatted differently (say a word in bold in the middle of regular text) would tend to clog together. And don’t even tell me about forms, text in forms, as you write, would just become a huge mess. The cursor wouldn’t follow the end of the text, and the letters appear one over the other, when they appear at all.

Oddly enough, I couldn’t see this behavior in any other application. Not in Opera, not in Safari, not anywhere else.

In ad desperate attempt to regain control of my Mac, I opened a new account for me and started to rebuild my environment and, eventually, the problem started to happen again.

I could track down that the problem was related to font installation.

I’ll spare you some dirty details, but here is what happened. Accidentally, when I was installing the fonts, I installed some windows native fonts that I had on my font directory (don’t ask me why!) that are also present on MacOS.

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I have surrended to the Mac wolrd and bought a Mac Mini. I have always used PC for several reasons, the most important being that in Brazil Macs are much more expensive than their PC counterparts.

Most arguments I’ve seen in the past in favor of Mac weren’t strong enough to worth the big price difference. But I found a decent price for this one and decided to give it a try.

As a very large portion of advanced users of computers, I am not a very big fan of Windows myself. For the most part, it seems to me that Microsoft decently addresses functionalities needed by an office, but seems to lack flexibility enough for development (including software and graphic development).

Linux on the other side, as Unix-Like systems in general has flexibility enough for just about anything under the sun, but imposes a penalty: it is harder to mantain.

Andrew Tannenbaum once said “The good thing about standards is that we have many to chose from”. I’m not sure I agree that is always good. In linux, I think that sometimes you can be faced with too many choices that have to be addressed. Let’s say that sometimes it can be “too much of a good thing”.

What pleases me most in Mac so far, is the fact that you are running a BSD (Unix-like) system, including a bash shell, or any other you may like. And that you can download unix code and compile it yourself, just like linux. But also you have a more-than-decent, integrated, easy to mantain and beautiful GUI for your non-unix work. That is having the best of two worlds.

Through years I heard mac users trying to sell the idea that the hardware was superior and best integrated, what could even be true, but I never entirely bought that idea. That was obviously true when Mac was first released, but the technology of PCs and Macs converged so much that I don’t quite know if that is true anymore.

But if it is so… well, that would be the best of three worlds.

My final thought is, we have so much horsepower on computers today that seems clear to me that the quality of interface (in terms of use, upgrade, etc.) is more important than the computer horsepower alone. At least for users others than servers, where arguably a native Unix is best, and Office use, when the same may hold true for windows.